A Most Wanted Man

A half-starved young Russian is smuggled into Hamburg at dead of night. He has an improbable amount of cash secreted in a purse around his neck. He is a devout Muslim. Or is he?

The long-awaited memoir by Fang Lizhi, the celebrated physicist whose clashes with the Chinese regime helped inspire the Tiananmen Square protests Fang Lizhi was one of the most prominent scientists of the People's Republic of China; he worked on the country's first nuclear program and later became one of the world's leading astrophysicists. His devotion to science and the pursuit of truth led him to question the authority of the Communist regime. That got him in trouble. In 1957, after advocating reforms in the Communist Party, Fang -- just twenty-one years old -- was dismissed from his position, stripped of his Party membership, and sent to be a farm laborer in a remote village. Over the next two decades, through the years of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, he was alternately denounced and rehabilitated, revealing to him the pettiness, absurdity, and horror of the regime's excesses. He returned to more normal work in academia after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, but the cycle soon began again. This time his struggle became a public cause, and his example helped inspire the Tiananmen Square protests. Immediately after the crackdown in June 1989, Fang and his wife sought refuge in the U.S. embassy, where they hid for more than a year before being allowed to leave the country. During that time Fang wrote this memoir The Most Wanted Man in China, which has never been published, until now. His story, told with vivid detail and disarming humor, is a testament to the importance of remaining true to one's principles in an unprincipled time and place.

Starting in 2001, much of the world media used the image of Osama bin Laden as a shorthand for terrorism. Bin Laden himself considered media manipulation on a par with military, political, and ideological tools, and intentionally used interviews, taped speeches, and distributed statements to further al-Qaida's ends. In Covering Bin Laden, editors Susan Jeffords and Fahed Yahya Al-Sumait collect perspectives from global scholars exploring a startling premise: that media depictions of Bin Laden not only diverge but often contradict each other, depending on the media provider and format, the place in which the depiction is presented, and the viewer's political and cultural background. The contributors analyze the representations of the many Bin Ladens, ranging from Al Jazeera broadcasts to video games. They examine the media's dominant role in shaping our understanding of terrorists and why/how they should be feared, and they engage with the ways the mosaic of Bin Laden images and narratives have influenced policies and actions around the world. Contributors include Fahed Al-Sumait, Saranaz Barforoush, Aditi Bhatia, Purnima Bose, Ryan Croken, Simon Ferrari, Andrew Hill, Richard Jackson, Susan Jeffords, Joanna Margueritte-Giecewicz, Noha Mellor, Susan Moeller, Brigitte Nacos, Courtney C. Radsch, and Alexander Spencer.

Smuggled into Hamburg, Issa, a Russian man carrying a large amount of cash, forms an alliance with Annabel, a civil rights lawyer, and Tommy Brue, scion of a failing British bank, as they become victims of intelligence operations.

It began with an unsigned email: "I am a senior member of the intelligence community". What followed was the most spectacular intelligence breach ever, brought about by one extraordinary man, Edward Snowden. The consequences have shaken the leaders of nations worldwide, from Obama to Cameron, to the presidents of Brazil, France, and Indonesia, and the chancellor of Germany. Edward Snowden, a young computer genius working for America's National Security Agency, blew the whistle on the way this frighteningly powerful organisation uses new technology to spy on the entire planet. The spies call it "mastering the internet". Others call it the death of individual privacy. This is the inside story of Snowden's deeds and the journalists who faced down pressure from the US and UK governments to break a remarkable scoop. Snowden's story reads like a globe-trotting thriller, from the day he left his glamorous girlfriend in Hawaii, carrying a hard drive full of secrets, to the weeks of secret-spilling in Hong Kong and his battle for asylum. Now stuck in Moscow, a uniquely hunted man, he faces US espionage charges and an uncertain future in exile. What drove Snowden to sacrifice himself? Award-winning Guardian journalist Luke Harding asks the question which should trouble every citizen of the internet age. Luke Harding's other books include Wikileaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy and Mafia State: How One Reporter Became an Enemy of the Brutal New Russia.

Two young lovers treat themselves to a once-in-a-lifetime holiday on the Caribbean island of Antigua. He's an austere tutor at Oxford. She's a sparky rising London barrister. Their native Britain is floundering in debt. On the second day of their holiday they encounter a rich, charismatic 50-something Russian millionaire called Dima who owns a peninsula, wears a diamondencrusted Rolex watch, has a tattoo on the knuckle of his right thumb, and wants a game of tennis. What else Dima wants is the engine that drives John le Carré's majestic, thrilling, tragic, funny, and utterly engrossing new novel of greed and corruption, from the arctic hells of the gulag archipelago to a billionaire's yacht anchored off the Adriatic Coast; to the Men's Final of the French Open tennis championships at the Roland Garros stadium; to two murky Swiss bankers dubbed Peter and the Wolf; and finally and fatally to a Swiss alpine resort nestling in the shadow of the north face of the Eiger and the story's terrifying end.

"The rise over the last two decades of a powerful new class of billionaire financiers marks a singular shift in the American economic and political landscape. Their vast reserves of concentrated wealth have allowed a small group of big winners to write their own rules of capitalism and public policy. How did we get here? ... Kolhatkar shows how Steve Cohen became one of the richest and most influential figures in finance--and what happened when the Justice Department put him in its crosshairs"--Amazon.com.

This provocative, “critically important” memoir of working-class boyhood in rural Indiana offers a searing cultural analysis of toxic masculinity in American culture (NPR). As progressivism changes American society, and globalism shifts labor away from traditional manufacturing, the roles that have been prescribed to men since the Industrial Revolution have been rendered obsolete. Donald Trump's campaign successfully leveraged male resentment and entitlement, and now, with Trump as president and the rise of the #MeToo movement, it’s clear that our current definitions of masculinity are outdated and even dangerous. Deeply personal and thoroughly researched, the author of The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore has turned his keen eye to our current crisis of masculinity using his upbringing in rural Indiana to examine the personal and societal dangers of the patriarchy. The Man They Wanted Me to Be examines how we teach boys what’s expected of men in America, and the long–term effects of that socialization―which include depression, shorter lives, misogyny, and suicide. Sexton turns his keen eye to the establishment of the racist patriarchal structure which has favored white men, and investigates the personal and societal dangers of such outdated definitions of manhood. “ . . . exposes the true cost of toxic masculinity . . . and takes aim at the patriarchal structures in American society that continue to uphold an outdated ideal of manhood.” —Book Riot